Many may know that Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey is taking credit for fast tracking the restoration of the Richmond Bridge third car lane – a project that will address acute traffic back ups on the bridge that go back onto 101 during the northbound evening rush hour. Supervisor Kinsey has been insistent that millions are spent to progress his vision of completing the “Bay Trail” – a bike / ped trail that encircles the bay. Recently this exchange occurred. The issue at hand is that to restore the 3rd car lane requires relocating an unused bike path in Point Molate (the eastern side of the bridge) at a cost of $15m and likely further delaying the project’s completion date. Supervisor Kinsey appears defiant in defending the expenditures, and evasive on the issue of the Point Molate bike lane relocation cost and project timeline impact. He appears unconcerned with expenditures of millions of dollars, or transportation projects with more acute needs. [From Steve Kinsey] I am not prepared to encourage BATA to ignore the State Highway Code, and they wouldn’t be able to do so even if I did. As a State mandate, it would be up to State legislative members to consider whether a change is warranted. In reading the Code sections cited, I doubt State legislators would be interested in making a revision, because the intent of it is to insure that highway projects don’t eliminate existing non-motorized facilities. The Code also commits the State to include parallel non-motorized facilities as part of highway projects when the alignment is part of an identified route, which is certainly...

Many are familiar with “the cloud” – that imaginary place up there in Internet “heaven” where companies and people can access file storage, computing power, movies or music instantaneously – on demand – whenever they need it. The computer cloud has disrupted conventional computing: Companies no longer need commit to buying dedicated servers that they may only fully utilize a few times a year. People no longer need to buy bigger disk drives to store their email – we have services like Gmail that seem to offer endless storage for mails we never seem to get around to deleting. We no longer buy movies or music, instead we subscribe to on-demand services capable of instantly gratifying us like Netflix and Spotify The Internet cloud, while seemingly imaginary and ethereal has transformed the computer industry – and the number are staggering: Research firm IDC estimates that businesses spent over $100 billion on cloud computing in 2014 (Source: The Economist) Amazon’s cloud services report year on year growth of 90% Netflix is estimated to use 34.9% of all downstream Internet traffic during peak periods on North American Broadband networks, closely followed by YouTube with 14% (Source: Variety, Nov 2014) Just as “the cloud” has disrupted and revolutionized business computing, communications and media consumption – so the coming “transportation cloud” will have similar radical impacts on the world around us. What is the Transportation Cloud? The short version: think Uber, add car-pooling then throw in Google self-driving cars. The longer version – imagine next time you need to leave your house to go shopping, go to work, get to the airport you’ll...

MTC’s response to Planning for Reality’s Public Records Request for the costs of the Richmond Bridge bike path includes a remarkable expense. As most folks know the bike path will cost $68m – but will likely be used by fewer than 156 cyclists over a 3 hour commute if usage is consistent with Marin bike paths (source: Walk Bike Marin, see table on page 23), meanwhile restoring an already built third car lane will cost $15m: The remarkable item appears on page 9: Relocation Assistance (Shuttle for Bikes) $1,095,000 Escalated value 2015: $1,161,685.50 Further into the breakdown it clarifies: Relocation Assistance Assume 8 hours a day Shuttle operation, 365 days a week, at $75/hr for 5 years $1,095,000 This appears to be a temporary shuttle bus that for five years will drive cyclists back and forth across the bridge! The ~156 cyclists don’t even have to wait for construction to complete, unlike the tens of thousands of motorists who will remain stuck in traffic until the work is completed. Limousines Cheaper than $1.2m Bike Shuttle It would be cheaper to taxpayers to rent limos for cyclists. You could rent a limousine for less than $75/hour, even before negotiating a discount for 5 years of service! Here is a list of multiple San Francisco limo services in SF that cost less than $75/hour (even before negotiation): http://www.sftodo.com/limousine_san_francisco.html Note: Planning for Reality anticipates receiving MTC’s response to its second records request on Richmond Bridge bike path costs by Feb 10th 2015. This original MTC response provided Nov 6th 2014 clearly showed the bike path cost of $68m, yet MTC’s spokesman Randy Rentschler stated...

It’s Time to Redefine “Sustainability”.

Planning for Reality provides a 21st century guide encouraging a healthy, skeptical and informed approach to planning decisions.

On this site you will find:
- a guide on common planning pitfalls for for councilors, planning commissioners and advisory committee members
- the tough questions to ask to understand if a project is genuinely "sustainable"
- a reference to rapidly changing transportation and land use legislation
- the latest news on "sustainable" transit oriented development and high density housing